Alicornutopia

Y'know how you can make an email link with <a href="mailto:somebody@someplace.com">? You can also make a telephone link with <a href="tel:555-123-4567">, and if someone with the relevant skype setup clicks it, it starts a phone call. Automatically. There's also a thing that looks for non-link telephone numbers in web pages and turns them into telephone links, but I don't remember if that's the same thing or a separate browser addon.

Falls firmly into the "why would anyone ever want to do that" category for most people here, I'm sure.

Yeah, that's an awfully dubious "feature".

The principal behind tel: links is good. Iff you regular use Skype for phone calls, it makes sense for it to handle them. It should not be automatically set up to handle them if you don't use it for regular phone calls and should certainly not place a call without an extra confirm button.

I like the browser extension which makes Google Voice respond to tel: links, though. I actually use Google Voice and it doesn't automatically place a call with a misclick.

Skype should probably be able to deal with "tel:" links without a specific browser add-on, but perhaps it only responds to them when you've got "Click to Call" and that also automatically does the browser add-on. If you have "skype:echo123?chat" as a link (it doesn't seem to like it on the forums: [url]skype:echo123?chat[/url]), it should also prompt you to chat with Skype's echo service, so it might accept "tel:" URIs without the add-on, too.

Click to call doesn't matter if the number is linked or not, i believe it just grabs any 10-digit number and sets itself up. It also shows search results with any number it finds on google (easily clickable beneath the link) and doesn't require addons, just clicking it in setup when installing. It is Satan. It charges you money.